What Are Schools For?

Our current national crisis enables us to seize the moment
to define our purposes as educators.

Our current national crisis enables us to seize the
moment to define our purposes as educators.

Like many New Yorkers, and other Americans throughout the country, I
did not know what to do with my horror on Sept. 11, 2001. I could not
give blood. Nor was I permitted to enter the emergency zones around the
World Trade Center. So I counseled students at the university where I
teach. Then I dove into thoughts about the arena I know best: pre-K to
grade 12 schools, public, private, and parochial. Somehow, in the midst
of our national school debate about standards and scores,
accountability and academics, crisis management and change, a central
set of questions has evaded discussion: Why do we have schools? What
are they for? How might we define their purpose?

While the turmoil of recent events clouds what the coming weeks and
months will bring, there is reasonable certainty that routines will
return. Adults will go back to work and their host of obligations.
Children and adolescents will assume their school responsibilities.
Life will trudge on. But it cannot and should not be exactly the
same.

As educators, researchers, parents, and students—learners
all—we ought to seize the moment to ask ourselves what roles we
want our schools to play. Our current national crisis suggests some
possibilities that fit present circumstances and have more sustained
implications:

Schools as caring centers. New York City's schools
chancellor closed schools for students on Sept. 12, the day after the
attack on the World Trade Center. But principals, assistant
principals, counselors, and school psychologists were required to
report to work, so that preparation could be made for grief
counseling and crisis intervention. The nation's largest school
system had to prepare itself for the nation's most dramatic domestic
tragedy.

In times like these, schools must convert themselves
into zones of comfort and support.

Clearly, the often stark, cold, and impersonal buildings called
schools must in times like these be able to convert themselves into
zones of comfort and support. Shouldn't this be a standard feature of
American schools? School buildings house our young for the largest
segment of their waking hours. They need to send out a message, through
any crisis and on every single school day, that schools are havens of
help. Schools need to convey this message: "We care about you, and we
care about each other." High standards, academic rigor, and
intellectual challenge can unfold within school walls. But this needs
to happen in a caring center, a safe setting committed to each
student and all the adults who work with them.

Nell Noddings and other researchers have written extensively on the
positive impact schools have when they convert themselves into caring
centers. This seems so obvious now. Burning towers need not be the only
signal that tells us to commit to it.

Schools as communities of connection and service.
Translating the caring agenda into specific policies and practices
ought to be the work of an entire school community, not just an
inspired administrator or an isolated classroom teacher. All the
purposes of schools, from teaching with high expectations to creating
responsive curricula, provide opportunities to connect people with
one another. School-effectiveness research resounds with this theme:
School stakeholders working together and taking ownership of what
schools do is a preferable model. We do not have to wait for a crisis
for this to happen.

Tales of Sept. 11 will be repeated for months to come. Many will
focus on stories of service, how people reached out to help, to
comfort, to make things better. Heroes will receive medals; citizens
will be recognized for what they said and did. This is the spirit that
will sustain us, inspire us, make us remember where the country's
strength lies.

This sense of service also is an element that can be part of daily
school life, something that binds us and drives us. Service projects
within the school and the surrounding community can be a way to
practice our academic skills and, more important, to provide an
opportunity to strengthen our sense of who we are. A service strand in
our schools becomes a way not only to tap the mind, but also to touch
the heart.

School as scholarly sites of inquiry. I was a first-year
high school social studies teacher in an all-black school in an
all-black community when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated in April of 1968. Almost naively, I reported to work the
day after that tragedy, a Friday, to witness emotional scenes of
every stripe: disbelief, fear, shock, confusion, and rampaging rage.
The questions on everyone's lips were why, how, and what does this
all mean? After a weekend spent glued to the television and ripping
through newspaper accounts, I had a collection of quotes and
questions to share with my students on Monday. Inspired by their
responses and their passion, I asked my department chair if I could
change the curriculum, so that my 9th graders could spend the
remaining months of that awful spring exploring the issues
surrounding Dr. King's assassination and its aftermath.

More than 20 years later, I was the principal of a junior-senior
high school when the Gulf War broke out. As American citizens and as
educators, we were shocked and concerned and did not know what to do.
But the opportunities for historical comparisons, debate of opposing
viewpoints, writing personal accounts in journals, and planning
appropriate service projects were obvious. In effect, I encouraged all
the teachers, of every subject and every grade, to convert their
classrooms into sites of inquiry. The school, as a caring and connected
community, created a wide range of academic and social vehicles to
translate the anger and anxiety into action.

These two anecdotes share a common theme. Motivated by catastrophic
events, schoolpeople made a pause in their rote routines. We stopped to
consider what we were teaching and how we were doing it. We shifted
from the more typical skill and drill, chalk and talk, banter and
boredom. We really did convert our classrooms into sites of inquiry.
Projects encouraged students, together and alone, to compare how
different leaders handled a crisis. Students considered how political
systems work, how difficult decisions are made, how ordinary citizens
get swept up into extraordinary events.

Avenues need to be created for students to consider in
depth these complicated issues.

In this era of incredible technology access, it is even easier for
students to search for answers. Let them surf the Internet as well as
dig into older, primary-source material in books as they try to figure
out how nations have dealt with terrorism in the past. Let them compute
the dramatic data about casualties and financial costs. Let them
compose alternative scenarios for handling airport security. Let them
debate where the fine line between liberty and security should be set
in extraordinary times. These are not easy questions. They defy simple
solutions. In them, we have the substance of deep and meaningful
learning, the type that ought to unfold every day.

Schools as arenas for clarifying values. Issues of right
and wrong face us every day. But they are magnified in times like
these. We can be sure that 7-year-olds and 17-year-olds alike will be
confused and conflicted by the events of Sept. 11 and their
implications. Some of these youngsters will be tormented by
nightmares, many will stubbornly pose impossible questions. Their
quest cannot be ignored.

Avenues need to be created for students to ask why and consider in
depth these complicated issues. Whether we are conscious of it or not,
every decision we make about a textbook, handout, article, poem, or
film segment used in class becomes an opportunity for rich discussion
or tireless tedium. Some of our teaching, inevitably, must center on
values-laden questions. The ethical dilemmas that fictional characters
face in literature, the complex decisions made by historic figures, the
moral decisions that have confounded scientists—all of these and
more need to be deliberated, dissected, and discussed.

The aftermath of this attack on America seems painted in stark
pictures of black and white. And, to be sure, some irrefutable value
questions are very clear. The murder of innocent civilians is simply
wrong. Other questions, however, have more complex nuances. For
example, does an anti-terrorist campaign justify the possible death of
innocent civilians in other nations? Are there limits to what we do to
combat terrorism? What punishments do we deem appropriate and why?

Schools as learning organizations. Schools should adopt
the organizational model advocated by author and MIT business
professor Peter M. Senge for corporations and nonprofit agencies.
They should become learning organizations that make five concurrent
commitments: to promote individual growth, team learning, and a
shared vision; to challenge individuals to examine their mental
models, how they view the world, and to suspend assumptions about why
they do what they do; and, binding these ideas together, to embrace
the concept of systems thinking, which involves the continual search
for greater knowledge of how current actions can be felt in distant
places or at extended times.

The learning-organization model forces schools to commit themselves
to change. Working with it means that schools will not do business as
usual. A crisis will not be needed to force examination of what we do
in schools and how we do it. The fabric of everyday school life will be
woven with a spirit of "we can be better and we can do better." This
spirit will provide the energy for achieving all the other vital school
purposes.

To those who argue that the purpose of schools is to serve as places
of learning, I offer no opposition. I would simply suggest that we
seriously consider what that learning ought to include.

Lew Smith is an associate professor at Fordham University's
graduate school of education, the director of the Fordham Center for
Educational Research and Leadership, and the director of the National
Principals Leadership Institute. He can be reached at lewsmith@fordham.edu.

Lew Smith is an associate professor at Fordham University's graduate
school of education, the director of the Fordham Center for Educational
Research and Leadership, and the director of the National Principals
Leadership Institute. He can be reached at lewsmith@fordham.edu.

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